Plunkbat costs fewer Plunkbucks, to celebrate hitting 50m players

Since pretty much day one, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been wildly popular enough that discounting it was about as logical as spending $3,600 per month on candles. But lately, two things have happened: 1) Fortnite is considered flavourtown these days 2) Plunkbat just passed the 50 million Plunkbatters milestone.

To celebrate/rezeitgeist, it’s now available for a third off for the next fortnight (ohhhhhhhhhhh) – making it $20 Plunkbucks instead of the usual $30. That’s 18 Plunks Sterling or 20 Plunkos, depending on exactly where you intend to Plunk from.That’s a 33% discount on the game via Steam, running until July 5. The official reasoning for the sale is all about hitting the 50m copies sold milestone, though that comprises both PC and Xbone. With the F2P mobile version thrown in too, Plunkcorp reckon their total registered users sit at 400m these days, with 87m Plunking every single day. Not bad for a wee small game whose recent Steam reviews average out at ‘Mostly Negative’, eh?

It’s very telling that the press release about this came from Valve/Steam, rather than Plunkcorp – very rarely do such things concern anything other than their own products. This has been an almighty money-spinner for Gabe’n’co, after all.

Say the devs,

“We’re genuinely humbled by PUBG’s ongoing success and growth, and we’re incredibly optimistic about the game’s future. We’re going to keep working on new content and improvements for all versions of the game. We know there’s still so much we can do to make PUBG a better game for our players.”

Well, they would, wouldn’t they? At the time of writing, Plunkbat is ‘only’ number 4 on Steam’s best-sellers-right-now chart, but a quick look at our weekly Steam charts reveals that it’s rarely away from the top two, once seven days’ of flogging are totted up. So I don’t think there’s much water in any argument that PUBG’s glory days are behind it – Fortnite’s a rival, yeah, and Fortnite’s bigger, yeah, but mostly because of The Kids, for whom toonish aesthetics and no cover price create a totally different prospect.

In any case, well done to Brendan ‘Plunk’ Green and his team. It’s a very good shootybangs game that rewrote what we now expect and desire from a modern multiplayer shootybangs game, and it ain’t going anywhere any time soon.